"I was about to melt," Chan, still incredulous at the experience at Dubai's Park Hyatt hotel. "My shirt was soaking wet. My friends were covered head to toe in formal wear and they were drinking really hot tea."

Chan, the co-owner of T, a Vancouver-based custom tea-blending company with a high-end hotel client base, may not understand it, but he embraces it anyway.

Forget the Popsicles and sprinklers. Hot drinks and spicy foods will make you sweat -- a function that ultimately cools you down.

In summer, Chan sees a boom in custom tea-blend sales, never mind that occupancy rates are usually down.

"We can never understand it, when it's really hot the hotel occupancy drops, there's less people in the hotels and restaurants, and tea consumption goes up.

"They're clearly drinking more tea per person in the summer."

Though it's steeped in nearly boiling water, Chan said he has noticed the effect on the drinker is cooling, particularly the Moroccan mint, usually prepared in the Middle East with lots of sugar.

UBC nutrition professor Susan Barr, who specializes in women's health and exercise physiology, knows a thing or two about sweat.

"I can speculate that sweating is a mechanism to cool the body. If you are drinking hot tea or eating spicy food and it makes you sweat, it can help dissipate the heat."

Restaurateur Vikram Vij, who runs the popular Indian eateries Vij's and Rangoli, said he has seen and felt the cooling effect of hot and spicy food.

But it isn't just any kind of spice or heat that'll cool you.

"It's when you create heat from the inside out, with cumin, clove, coriander, ginger or cinnamon.